Paul Merton
I’d just come out of Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London, because I’d had a very bad reaction to an anti-malarial drug, Larium. I’d gone on holiday to Kenya at the end of 1989. The daily drug was fine, but the weekly one gave me manic episodes. Every Friday I’d get very strange, but by Sunday it had worn off.
I’d been on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and had co-written a TV sketch show – Paul Merton: The Series – which was due to start filming in February 1990, but got postponed for a year. I came out of hospital in April and the pilot was shot on a very warm, Sunday summer afternoon in Wandsworth. I remember the weather because you had the feeling the audience didn’t particularly want to be in a hot TV studio, not knowing what they were going to see. There was a feeling of whatever the opposite of “a buzz in the air” is.
John Lloyd hosted it, which he didn’t enjoy, with journalists Simon Hoggart and Jaci Stephen, myself and Ian. The idea was that Ian would know all the news questions and I could provide the comedy. Ian would be the intelligent one and I would be the funny one. It wasn’t the most promising start, but the BBC had already committed to a series. Producer Harry Thompson and comedian Angus Deayton wrote the scripts. Harry had a keen sense of humour. He’d say: “Here’s a joke for you. Angus doesn’t think it’s funny.” When it got a laugh, Angus would have this quizzical look on his face.
I wore a T-shirt because everybody wore suits and ties. I thought we looked like a parole board, and it needed an element of anarchy. I also wanted some rudeness. The news agenda always changes. In our history, the only stories that wouldn’t go away were Brexit, Covid and Trump. There are five people, three of whom weren’t there last week. No one is irreplaceable in show business. But we’ll keep going until the sun explodes and consumes the Earth, which will be the top story the following week.
Ian Hislop
I’d been editor of Private Eye since 1986 and had been a writer for Spitting Image up until Mrs Thatcher resigned. I’d also been on The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4, which was sort of Private Eye vs Punch. Paul and I met on a programme called Etc in the autumn/winter of 1988, that was a mixture of standup and current affairs and went out live on a Friday night, but only in the Southern TV region as it was at the time. Seeing us on that made Jimmy Mulville, who runs the production company Hat Trick, think: “I’ll cast those two in this new quiz thing I’ve got up my sleeve.”
It was called John Lloyd’s Newsround, in a nod to John Craven’s Newsround. We filmed the pilot in Wandsworth on a very hot summer afternoon. My mother was there and afterwards she said: “Oh, never mind, darling.” Like lots of pilots, bits didn’t work but bits did. They tried various people as the presenter and decided on Angus because he’d played a newsreader on various sketch shows and was very good at acting like a newsreader, which he did rather brilliantly on the show.
Given it was not a very good pilot, it absolutely took off from the first show. The news changes every week, so you’ve got a huge plus there. Most comedy in Britain is about class. We think we’re obsessed by sex. We’re not really. The pairing of Paul – who’s still cross that people went to Oxbridge – and me was a very good bit of casting because it meant there are two completely different styles. I care about the news. He doesn’t. That dynamic was very clever. Paul thought I was a stuffed shirt and I thought he was an oik. The boundaries were set fairly early on.
Most of the threats over the years have been that various governments have leant on the BBC and told them this programme is appallingly leftwing or appallingly rightwing, depending which government it is. They’ve managed to find enormous bias against themselves when they’re in office. That has always struck me as the more likely end. There aren’t many other comedy shows left like ours. We’re the last bed by the door. I expect it’s just a matter of time.